With the NHL season drawing ever closer, it’s the perfect time to make bold statements that you’ll regret come the season end in April.

So in true bold statement spirit, here are the rookies I think you should know about going into the season.

The twist though, I will not talk about Auston Matthews (Toronto Maple Leafs) or Patrik Laine (Winnipeg Jets) because that would just be an easy way to use the word count that I don’t actually have, but it’d also waste your time because i’m sure you know exactly what to expect from these two.

As well as excluding Matthews and Laine, I’ll also exclude guys like Matt Murray (for obvious reasons) and William Nylander (22 games already in the NHL) just to focus on newer guys to the league.

Now that the Colorado Avalanche have a new coach, they can finally focus on their upcoming season which I think should see them pushing for a playoff berth after a two-year absence from the post-season.

Jared Bednar comes in on a three-year deal to lead the Avs after the sudden resignation of Patrick Roy, Bednar comes in after leading the Lake Erie Monsters to the AHL Calder Cup last year. A career AHLer and ECHLer, 44-year old Bednar is making a big jump by taking his first coaching job in the NHL but the timing must be right. Since hanging up his skates in 2002 he’s been in a coaching role straight away taking an assistant role with the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays. After five-years as an assistant he was promoted in 2007 to lead the Stingrays and in his second year in charge he captured the Kelly Cup. After that success he went onto the AHL where he’s been ever since.

While there are only four teams left in the NHL playing hockey, the rest are playing golf, I’m going to look at which team is picking where in next month’s draft and tell you who they’re going to pick with almost everything that follows the top three selections being highly inaccurate.

For arguments sake I’ll list the bottom four teams (St. Louis, San Jose, Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay) in order of how they finished in the regular season standings, the team with the lowest points of the four will get back 27 for example and the highest will get pick 30.

I released a mock draft of the first 14 selections after the NHL Draft Lottery a few weeks back so you can check that out as well to see how much my selections have changed.

After the 2016 NHL Draft Lottery came to a conclusion with a rare win for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the first 14 teams to select in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft are confirmed so it’s time to start looking at who’s picking who.

If you haven’t heard of Auston Matthews then you probably haven’t really followed Ice Hockey properly for the last year, or you just have very little interest (which is why you’ll have closed the web browser before finishing this paragraph.)

Matthews is the consensus number one pick in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft in Buffalo this summer, the 18-year old from Arizona took the unusual route of spending his draft year playing professional hockey rather than US or Canadian Junior, joining ZSC Lions where he registered 46 points in 36 regular season games for the Swiss side, proving his incredible abilities against men already.

So there’s been a lot return about this American centre who’ll likely be wearing an NHL sweater next season for whoever wins the draft lottery, but let’s get to know one of his closest competitors to be the number one selection on June 24th.